Words and Photos by Bret Kepner
4/25/2007
Although he held neither Low ET or Top Speed, Joshua Hernandez (above) was positively brutal at MMP. Electing to sit in the pits until the second round of the ‘06 World Finals rerun, crewchief Howard Moon produced an out-of-the-box 3.879, complete with a career-best 2.56 330-feet ET, at 191.65 mph for a win over Texan Bobby Booth’s ‘53 ‘Vette. Moon tempered his rage in the semif-inals of the WF, backing off to a 3.94/188.71 over Brandon Pesz in Steve Engel’s team ‘63 Stingray. Hernandez will have to wait another month to race for last season’s final victory, however.
While even ADRL President Kenny Nowling now refers to the event as “the Race That Never Happened”, the ill-fated inaugural SHELOR.com Motor Mile Winter/Spring Drags managed to produce one glorious day and night of drag racing at George Howard’s Montgomery Motorsports Park. Although tornado sirens and torrential rains wiped out Saturday’s official qualifying and the approaching cold front turned Sunday’s eliminations into a repeat of the wintry weather which forced the postponement of the event’s original February date, an ADRL record of ninety-one vehicles in four different categories thrilled a capacity crowd on Friday, the thirteenth of April.
 Todd Tutterow kept his Willys in PX and clocked a 4.093/183.07 best but really got the troops buzzing when his first effort with his infamous blown small block Mustang in the Xtreme 10.5 division resulted in a totally overpowered launch. Tutterow coasted to mid-track, backed up, restaged and, reportedly leaving the line in second gear, shot to a 4.43 at 160 mph. A later 4.60 at 169.55 mph caused onlooker Shannon Jenkins to comment, “Thos ten-five guys better be lookin’ out now!“. |
The ADRL’s traditional eight-hour Friday testing day would’ve made for impressive fields had qualifying been in force; thirty-two Pro Xtreme entries would have produced a 4.097-second sixteen-car bump spot, thirty-three Pro Nitrous competitors would have put up a 4.189-second “bubble” and the top four of nine Xtreme 10.5 cars were spread between 4.42 and 4.46! The event also featured the debut of the new Pro Xtreme nitrous Motorcycle division, (for which two official qualifying periods were actually completed), which included seventeen machines and a spread of only five hundredths of a second between the top five qualifiers! Likewise, the attempted continuation of the rained-out eliminations from the 2006 ADRL World Finals in Kennedale, Texas, managed to inch closer to a conclusion. The final rounds have now been moved to the next 2007 ADRL event at Valdosta, Georgia’s South Georgia Motorsports Park and, if finally finished, will have required nearly seven months and almost exactly one thousand road miles to complete.
While rescheduling plans were not complete at presstime, the ADRL’s first visit to Montgomery, Alabama, will not soon be forgotten by the multitudes of fans who squeezed into MMP for the “Race That Never Happened”. Here, then, is “the rest of the story”.